There are many industry standards, recommendations, and best practices that can help you to create your own incident response. You can still use those as a reference to make sure you cover all the relevant phases for your type of business. The one that we are going to use as a reference in this book is the computer security incident response (CSIR)—publication 800-61R2 from NIST [1]. Regardless of the one you select to use as a reference, make sure to adapt it to your own business requirements. Most of the time in security the concept of "one size fits all" doesn't apply; the intent is always to leverage well-known standards and best practices and apply them to your own context. It is important to retain the flexibility to accommodate your business needs in order to provide a better experience when operationalizing it.

Reasons to have an IR process in place

Before we dive into more details about the process itself, it is important...

Handling an incident in the context of the IR life cycle includes the detection and containment phases.

In order to detect a threat, your detection system must be aware of the attack vectors, and since the threat landscape changes so rapidly, the detection system must be able to dynamically learn more about new threats and new behaviors, and trigger an alert if a suspicious activity is encountered.

While many attacks will be automatically detected by the detection system, the end user has an important role in identifying and reporting the issue in case they find a suspicious activity.

For this reason, the end user should also be aware of the different types of attack and learn how to manually create an incident ticket to address such behavior. This is something that should be part of the security awareness training.

Even with users being diligent by closely watching for suspicious activities, and with sensors configured to send alerts when an attempt...

The incident priority may dictate the containment strategy—for example, if you are dealing with a DDoS attack that was opened as a high-priority incident, the containment strategy must be treated with the same level of criticality. It is rare that the situations where the incident is opened as high severity are prescribed medium-priority containment measures, unless the issue was somehow resolved in between phases.

Real-world scenario

Let's use the WannaCry outbreak as a real-world example, using the fictitious company Diogenes & Ozkaya Inc. to demonstrate the end-to-end incident response process.

On May 12, 2017, some users called the help desk saying that they were receiving the following screen:

Figure 5: A screen from the WannaCry outbreak

After an initial assessment and confirmation of the issue (detection phase), the security team was engaged and an incident was created. Since many systems were experiencing the same issue...

When we speak about cloud computing, we are talking about a shared responsibility [4] between the cloud provider and the company that is contracting the service. The level of responsibility will vary according to the service model, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 6: Shared responsibility in the cloud

For Software as a service (SaaS), most of the responsibility is on the cloud provider; in fact, the customer's responsibility is basically to keep their infrastructure on premises protected (including the endpoint that is accessing the cloud resource). For Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), most of the responsibility lies on the customer's side, including vulnerability and patch management.

Understanding the responsibilities is important in order to understand the data gathering boundaries for incident response purposes. In an IaaS environment, you have full control of the virtual machine and have complete access to all logs...

In this chapter, you learned about the incident response process, and how this fits into the overall purpose of enhancing your security posture.

You also learned about the importance of having an incident response process in place to rapidly identify and respond to security incidents. By planning each phase of the incident response life cycle, you create a cohesive process that can be applied to the entire organization. The foundation, of the incident response plan is the same for different industries, and on top of this foundation, you can include the customized areas that are relevant to your own business. You also came across the key aspects of handling an incident, and the importance of post-incident activity—which includes full documentation of the lessons learned—and using this information as input to improve the overall process. Lastly, you learned the basics of incident response in the cloud and how this can affect your current process.

In the next...